Thomas D. Hill

The Unchanging Hero: A Stoic Maxim in The Wanderer and Its Contexts

IT is a paroemiological commonplace (a proverb scholar’s proverb) that proverbs and sentences are often difficult and sometimes very enigmatic indeed. Even native speakers may find it hard to provide an adequate gloss for a current proverbial expression, and on occasions they may find a proverb wholly enigmatic. It is with appropriate hesitation, then, that I would like to reopen the discussion of a difficult sapiential passage in The Wanderer. The Wanderer is a soliloquy spoken by an exiled warrior who laments the lost joys of his youth and who moves from considering his own personal loss and suffering to the tribulations of the world itself in its last age. One consolation is the reflection that experience is necessary for wisdom; the Wanderer moves from a statement of this truism to a definition of wisdom.

Invocation of the Trinity and the Tradition of the Lorica in Old English Poetry

These lines are problematical in that Judith is an Old Testament heroine, and one would not expect a poet as sophisticated as the Judith poet to have an Old Testament figure speak as a Christian. Admittedly even good medieval poetry is often anachronistic; popular poetry such as the later medieval drama is strikingly so. Nevertheless, this passage remains a minor anomaly in Judith.2 Although I cannot justify Judiths anachronistic prayer on aesthetic

The Crowning of Alfred and the Topos of Sapientia et Fortitudo in Asser's Life of King Alfred

At the crucial moment in Assers De Rebus Gestis Alfredi in which Asser narrates the crowning of Alfred, Asser praises Alfred in two balanced clauses celebrating respectively Alfreds sapientia and his fortitudo. The use of this famous topos in this context is interesting and important, and it also relevant to the structure of the work as whole. It has long been recognized that the De Rebus Gestis Alfredi is a bi-partite work and that the two halves of the work are quite different in their concerns. I suggest that Asser was deliberately structuring the work as a whole in terms of this theme, first celebrating Alfreds fortitudo in the Danish wars, and then celebrating his sapientia, his achievements as a philosopher king, in the final portion of the Vita.

The Evisceration of Bródir in ‘Brennu-Njáls Saga’

One of the most memorable and hideous scenes in Njals saga is the death of the apostate viking chief Broðir. According to the account of the battle of Clontarf in the saga, after the Irish forces had won the victory most of Brian Borus bodyguard left the king in order to pursue the survivors. Broðir, who had been hiding in the woods near the battlefield, saw that the king was relatively unprotected, and took the opportunity to break through the line of men who were protecting King Brian and kill him.

“Thomas Rhymer (A)” and the Tradition of Early Modern Feminist Theology

One sometimes has the experience of knowing two apparently unrelated bits of information—sometimes for years—until suddenly it occurs to one that they are in fact related and indeed illuminate each other in quite startling ways. I have had the good fortune to teach some of the Scots ballads for the last decade or so and have taught “Thomas Rhymer (A)” and ‘Tam Lin (A)” as exemplars of Scots Other World balladry. It is a truism (and the first piece of information) that the worldview of these ballads differs quite markedly from the medieval Catholic worldview that was current when these ballads may have originated and the Scots Presbyterian one that was the dominant ideology in the time and place when they were collected. Few ballad scholars would dispute this claim.

The Passio Andreae and The Dream of the Rood

Abstract For nearly a century now, scholars have raised the question of the influence of the apocryphal Passio Andreae on The Dream of the Rood, but this suggestion has been discussed in terms of broad similarities. One striking specific parallel concerns the history of the Cross. In the accounts of the passion of Jesus in the gospels, Jesus is forced to bear the Cross from Jerusalem to Golgotha. In The Dream of the Rood, however, Jesus goes willingly to the place where the Cross (which has been used before) has already been set up. This account of the sequence of the passion corresponds exactly to the passion of Andrew in which Andrew goes willingly and of his own volition to a Cross which has been used as a gallows before. This correspondence, together with other points of similarity, suggest that The Dream of the Rood poet used some form of the Passio Andreae as a model for his narrative.

The Middle English “Judas” Ballad and the Price of Jesus: Ballad Tradition and the Legendary History of the Cross

The Middle English poem ‘‘Judas’’ is of great literary historical importance as the earliest attested English ballad. Indeed, not only is it the earliest ballad, but it is a century or so older than any other English ballad which has come down to us. It is so much earlier that some scholars, suspicious of the conception of the ‘‘medieval ballad’’, have challenged its status as a ballad at all. This is not the place to argue the case in detail; but before turning to more specific problems, I wish to reaffirm the traditional claim. One has to choose between two possibilities. Either an English poet, writing about the history of the Passion in a popular mode, invented narrative techniques characteristic of later ballad tradition and a number of ballad conventions and these conventions and techniques were promptly forgotten and not reinvented until a century or more later, or ‘‘Judas’’ is indeed an early ballad. If one wishes, one can redefine ‘‘Judas’’ as a religious narrative poem that owes much to ballad conventions and techniques, but from a literary historical perspective these two positions are the same, in that they presume an ongoing tradition of medieval balladry to which ‘‘Judas’’ is our earliest English witness. The ballad is so important for literary-historical reasons that it could be argued that scholars have not focussed as much on the textual and narrative problems which the ballad presents as they might have. In this paper I would like to discuss some philological problems and to argue further that understanding the legendary context of ‘‘Judas’’ enables us to understand the

“Leger weardiao”: The Wife's Lament 34b

. “The Timaeus in Old English.” &xis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts. Costerus ns 133. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 255-67. . “Editions of Alfred: the Wages of Un-influence.” Forthcoming. Wittig, Joseph. “King Alfred’s Boethius and Its Latin Sources: A Reconsideration.” Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983): 157-98. Ziolkowski, Jan. “The Prosirnetrum in the Classical Tradition.” Prosirnetrum: Cmsscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse. FA. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl. Cambridge: Brewer, 1997. 45-65.

Hebrews, Israelites, and Wicked Jews: An Onomastic Crux in ‘Andreas’ 161-67

In the Old English poem Andreas , the narrative begins with the imprisonment and suffering of Matthew, who is blinded and forced to drink a magic potion which is intended to reduce him to bestiality. This drink, which literarily is directly descended from Circes potion, fails to be effective in this case, and Matthew prays to God for help in his affliction. God responds directly and tells Matthew that He will bring help. Gods help is mediated by the apostle Andrew, and immediately before God summons Andrew He is apostrophized in the following passage: þa w aes gemyndig, se Ðe middangeard gestaÐelode strangum mihtum. hu he in ellþeodigum yrmÐum wunode belocen leoÐubendum, þe oft his lufan adreg for Ebreum ond Israhelum, swylce he Iudea galdorcraeftum wiÐstod stranglice. 1

The Cross as Psychopomp: The Dream of the Rood, Lines 135–44

Abstract One striking feature of the iconography of The Dream of the Rood is that in the conclusion of the poem the Dreamer speaks of the Cross as a “psychopomp”, a spiritual guide who will lead the Dreamer to joy in heaven. No convincing sources or parallels for this conception have been cited in the tradition of commentary on the Old English poem, but there are broad parallels for this conception in homiletic tradition, which seem to have inspired some prayers in liturgical texts which explicitly speak of the Cross as a psychopomp. These prayers thus provide a close parallel and arguably a source for this motif in The Dream of the Rood.